Back in 1990, I was one of the first people interviewed by Fast Forward. (I was interviewed again in 2010, which you can watch by checking out the archives here, but since that’s only last year, stepping into the time machine won’t be quite as interesting as what’s below.)

The show is currently run by Mike Zipser and Kathi Overton (who recently dug out the video you’re about to see). John Pomeranz conducted the 21-year-old interview. How has time changed us? Well, here’s what John and I looked like together 17 years later at the 2007 Worldcon in Japan.

What did I learn when looking back at the episode (during which I share the stage with writer Judith Eckerson)?

First, that I sure said the phrase “and so forth” a heck of a lot! Sure glad I broke myself of that habit. (more…)

Some who’ve read my recent posts “A few words in defense of Jack Kirby, Sal Buscema, Irv Novick, and other anonymized artists“, “A few further thoughts on the artwork of Sharon Moody,” “Brian Bolland’s brilliantly blistering rebuttal,” and “Why a comic book isn’t a Hershey’s bar” seem to have gotten the erroneous impression that I’ve have a thing against mashups, smashups, allusions, sampling, remixing, tributes, homages, or whatever word you’d prefer to use for the act of performing alchemy on existing works to make something new.

Hey, I’ve got no problem with any of those acts—I’ve committed many of them myself. But I do believe one should always act honestly, openly, and with full disclosure, especially when one is borrowing from another artist who could be considered il miglior fabbro.

I actually love that kind of comics-related art when done appropriately. Here are some examples that intrigue or entertain me rather than offend.

You should make a habit of visiting the Covered blog, where contemporary artists reinterpret classic (and some not so classic) comics covers.

Check out Brodie H. Brockie’s take on Flash #175.

One thing to note is that beneath these images, in addition to crediting Brockie, Covered also stated, “Original cover by Carmine Infantino and Mike Esposito; DC 1967.” The correct and classy thing to do. (more…)

There’s been a ton of great commentary about that Sharon Moody artwork over on the Bleeding Cool bulletin boards, though if you want to follow all the threads of what the site’s commenters have said so far, you’ll have to check out its republication of my original article, its posting of my wife’s essay on the event, plus Dean Butters’ defense of the appropriation.

One of the posts I was happiest to see was this one from Joe B. Pangrazio, which quoted one of the co-owners of the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery as follows:

Anyone who attends the exhibition of her work will read that she has already acknowledged the artists who illustrated the comics on which her art is based. I would like to extend to you my personal invitation to see the exhibition as well. Perhaps we can discuss the subject further face to face. You might be interested to know that there is a recently published book entitled, “The Art Prophets.” One of the chapters is devoted to Stan Lee and the early history of DC and Action Comics, a subject you certainly know much about. You might also be pleased to know that he and Jack Kirby and others are treated on a par with other fine art world figures, including my business partner who has his own chapter as well. We have this book on hand for people to purchase for their own libraries should they be interested in the subject. It is good to know that the comic book artists and creators are finally getting the attention they deserve.

I was pleased to read those words, because it was the first response I’d heard that credit was being given where credit was due. I have no idea whether the acknowledgements always existed or were only posted publicly after the brouhaha began, since if full credit was already in place, I’d have assumed we’d have heard that earlier, with a simple, “Hey, man, you’ve got us all wrong, we’re not trying to ignore the original artists, we’ve always been giving them credit,” which would have gone far to assuage much of the concern. I look forward to learning the answer to that, and also to seeing the nature of the acknowledgements themselves, which I plan to do in the beginning of January when I visit the exhibition.

There’s one other thing I’d like to address before then, though.

Over the past week, as I’ve read your comments here and those over at Bleeding Cool, I’ve realized that some were correct to call me out on one aspect of this. I was accused of being more concerned with the lack of acknowledgement of the comics creators than the anonymity of the creators of some of the other commercial objects that had been mentioned. After mulling it over it, I realized that, yes, I was. I am.

Well … why? Why, for example, didn’t I demand recognition of whomever brought the Hershey’s bar wrapper into being, since Moody drew on that for one of her paintings as well?

And after thinking it over, here are several reasons I feel that way. (more…)

Back in January, on New Year’s Day, I cooked my first goose, and as another holiday season approached, I wanted to whip up some other sort of feast that was just as special, but also one that took me into new culinary territory. I chose suckling pig … the purchasing of which proved to be far more difficult than I’d at first imagined.

I figured I’d be able to buy one easily—don’t lots of folks serve them around Christmas?—but not a single butcher in my area carried them. And they couldn’t even recommend a local farmer who’d sell me one either. So I ran over to A & H Gourmet and Seafood Market in Bethesda—where I couldn’t resist buying those quail I told you about last week. I was looking for a 9-12 pound pig, but when I arrived, all they had was one that weighed 17.5 pounds. No big deal, I thought. I figured we’d have no problem eating that much pork.

But there was a secondary issue I hadn’t considered until after I got the beast home …

The frozen suckling pig was 24″ long, as you can see via the yardstick above, and we could easily store it in my basement freezer until I was ready. But I realized that not only is my refrigerator just 18″ wide, my oven is only slightly larger, at 22″ wide! (more…)

I received a package from Paul Di Filippo today containing a CD of ukulele music. I guess he could hear my caterwauling all the way up in Providence and wants me to stop making noises as if someone or something was being tortured. Sure do appreciate it, Paul.

But that’s not the thing Paul’s trying to tell me that’s sending a message I don’t want to hear.

You see, Paul decorated the envelope with clippings from old magazines and newspapers, the way he always does before popping anything in the mail. The front was a humorous collage, but as for the back, well, that was made up of a single large ad (a version of which seems to have been published in the 1947 Johnson Smith & Co. catalogue) which strongly implied there was something lacking about me.

The ad began:

In your business and social affairs—meeting and dealing with other people—have you the cold, “icicle” type of personality that constantly repels others and keeps them at a distance?

And it only went downhill from there …

(more…)

If you think I was being too tough on artist Sharon Moody in my two recent posts, what Brian Bolland had to say about a similar situation—one during which he was the victim—makes anything I had to say look like a Valentine!

Bolland, who is perhaps most well-known for having drawn Batman: The Killing Joke and who created my favorite Batman: Black and White story, the chilling “An Innocent Guy,” was stunned when he visit the Pompidou Centre gift shop in 2010 and found “a large poster of MY ‘Tank Girl’ signed by you [Icelandic artist Erró] and on sale for 600 Eu. It consisted of a badly copied version of my work and, where the original logo had been, a group of figures presumably taken from Maoist Social Realism.”

To the left is a photo of Bolland with his original piece, and to the right is a photo of Bolland in front of that gift shop and the poster by Erró.

Here’s a small part of Bolland’s open letter to the artist who used his work without attribution: (more…)

While I was definitely hoping that attention would be paid to the paintings of Sharon Moody—or why else would I have told you about them Saturday in “A few words in defense of Jack Kirby, Sal Buscema, Irv Novick, and other anonymized artists“—I’m stunned by how viral my post went, with spirited conversation not just here, but over at Bleeding Cool, The Beat, Byrne Robotics, reddit, Twitter, and all across Facebook.

Most of you felt my point was valid, but I’d like to respond to some of the concerns of those who didn’t … though first, I’d like to share a couple of intriguing comments made by others.

First up, over at Byrne Robotics, John Byrne (who as you can see, I’ve known a long, long time) wrote:

Imagine if some “artist” got an old fashioned projector and a copy of some Disney movie made within the last thirty or forty years, and then set it up in a gallery, playing the movie against a blank wall, and saying it was a “comment” on how everything is going digital these days.

How long before Disney shut ’em down—hard?

This kind of thing happens with comics only because of the extreme contempt most people have for the form. Comics are not “art”, you know. When Roy Lichtenstein plagiarized Alex Toth, or Steve Ditko, or Jack Kirby, he was ELEVATING their pathetic creations.

FEH!!!

Meanwhile, over on her blog, Irene Vartanoff, who was in charge of rights and permissions at DC Comics in the 1980s (and who happens to be my wife, but don’t let that bias you), wrote:

Some comic book artists have helped support themselves in their old age by re-drawing comic book pages they were hired to originally create as works for hire for the companies in years past. Usually, the companies look the other way instead of pursuing these elderly artists for this kind of commercial use, presumably because it doesn’t involve enough money to be worth the lawsuits, and it would result in bad press. In fact, Disney did pursue the artist Carl Barks for making such copies, but backed away from the bad publicity the move generated. Bob Kane, known for his involvement in the creation of Batman, also used to sell paintings of Batman, without being sued. Thus Sharon Moody’s lawyers would have a potential rebuttal, that an artistic, single use has a pattern of being tolerated by the rights owners.

I could share plenty more interesting comments, but instead, now that 48 hours have gone by since my original post, I’d like to recap here a few additional thoughts in response to those who have come to Moody’s defense, and not just leave them scattered across the Internet. (more…)

Everything I know about the timeline of the microwave—which isn’t much—I learned from Wikipedia.

Date #1 to keep in mind: “The specific heating effect of a beam of high-power microwaves was discovered accidentally in 1945 … ” (I did know it was an accidental discovery, though not the year.)

Date #2 to note: “The use of high-frequency electric fields for heating dielectric materials had been proposed in 1934 … ”

If that’s the case, then how is it that the following article appeared in the February 1, 1931 issue of the New York Times, reporting that “cooking by means of electric waves was demonstrated here yesterday on a machine which produced a nicely prepared steak in five minutes” and that “the apparatus consists of an enamelled [sic] box about the size of a radio receiver which contains an ordinary high frequency machine”?

Is there something I’m not getting here because I’m scientifically illiterate? Wasn’t what happened in 1931—”cooking by means of electric waves” in “an enamelled box”—a microwave oven?

Educate me, all you big brains out there!

I was reading the December 12 issue of the New York Observer when I spotted something that irked me.

Now understand, finding something in the Observer that offends me isn’t at all unusual. Not an issue goes by when I don’t discover something to offend me in the salmon-colored pages of this snide, smarmy rag, which encapsulates just about everything I dislike about New York. It’s a publication for the 1%. When I think of its intended readership, what comes to mind is that picture going around of champagne-swilling bankers smirking while looking down at Occupy protesters from a restaurant terrace.

And to answer your unasked question—which I assume would be, “Well, then why did you subscribe?”—my subscription was entirely accidental. I had expiring air miles—from Delta, I think—and used them to sign on for a bunch of magazines and newspapers. I’d never read the New York Observer before then, and once the issues started arriving and I saw what I’d gotten myself into, I looked forward to the sub ending so I wouldn’t be tortured by its worldview. I’d read each issue while metaphorically holding my nose, doing my best to treat it as an anthropological study of a zeitgeist I despise.

And now that I’ve gotten that rant out of my system …

What was it in particular that I suddenly felt a need to bring to your attention? Something I saw in a half page ad for the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery. It offered for sale a single painting: “Mjolnir—To Thy Master!”

Take a look for yourself.

The artist’s name was … Jack Kirby, right? Wrong. It’s the work of an artist named Sharon Moody, and Kirby’s name was nowhere to be seen. I investigated a little further, and discovered other similar paintings. (more…)

I’m way behind on Boardwalk Empire, having only seen four of the second season’s twelve episodes, which means I’ve been dodging spoilers like crazy since Sunday’s finale … and often not dodging them very well. I’ve already learned a couple of things I wish I hadn’t.

But one thing I didn’t mind knowing in advance was that I’d eventually see my high school pal Bill Forsythe—with whom I’d acted in Fiorello—in half a dozen episodes as a character named Manny Horvitz.

I haven’t spoken to Bill since he was costarring in the TV series John Doe a decade ago, which I told you about back in 2008. I wrote a sidebar to SCI FI magazine‘s piece on the show, though what tickled me most wasn’t the sidebar but the sidebar to the sidebar which used our high school yearbook photos.

(more…)